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Some years ago, I was conducting research on the history of imprisonment in the Scandinavian countries, which later came to form part of my doctoral dissertation. One strand of this research took me to the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm where I came upon a series of boxes the containing the files of Karl Schlyter, Sweden’s progressive minister of justice in the mid-1930s. Schlyter had been something of a firebrand social democrat. His professional pedigree was impeccable, but unlike most bourgeois jurists, he had used his legal capital in service of a progressive reform of law and punishment—as seen in his advocacy for “emptying the prisons,” a radical stance for a highly placed former civil servant, judge, and then Minister of Justice.

For his 85th birthday, former Beatle drummer Ringo Starr expressed just one wish in a video message to his followers: that everyone join together “at noon, wherever you are, all over the world” in a display of “peace and love”—his signature mantra, always accompanied by a V-shaped peace sign gesture.

Ringo’s pious wish continues to endear him to his millions of fans and followers. As one of the most beloved members of The Beatles—due in part for his apparent, perhaps deceptive, simplicity—Ringo’s seemingly naïve insistence on the continued importance of peace and love, in an age of cynicism and violence, feels oddly refreshing.

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (2025). Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House. William Morrow.

In Fight, veteran political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes guide us through one of the most momentous electoral campaigns in recent memory, offering a post-operative assessment of Kamala Harris’s whirlwind 107-day effort—launched in the wake of Biden’s less-than-stellar debate performance in late June 2024—and Trump’s third-iteration campaign machine that ultimately secured him a second term. Figuring out what went wrong with Harris’s campaign, and why Trump was successful after crashing so decisively in 2020, should be of essential interest to anyone to the left of fascism.

At first glance, TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out,” seemed like a smart, playful acronym when it first began making the rounds on social media earlier this year. In the wake of Trump’s apparent vacillation over global tariffs, TACO named a feature of Trump 2.0’s first few months: While “reciprocal” tariffs were announced on April 2nd to much fanfare, they were shortly thereafter paused for a number of countries, suggestive of a Trump White House once again in disarray despite the post-2024 election propaganda about a more professional and polished second-term Trump. Trump 2.0 was still, it seemed, characterized by brash pronouncements one moment, followed by the inevitable climb-down the next, as markets were roiled by MAGA shock therapy. In a piece published weeks before the Iran strikes, the FT’s Gideon Rachman has also drawn attention to a study showing that Trump has threatened dozens of adversaries with the use of force, but “only” deployed force a handful of times. Hence, TACO: Trump always backs down, chickens out, doesn’t have the guts to stay the course.

It’s election season in Norway. On September 8, voters will likely choose between a red-green coalition—including the Labour Party, Socialist Left Party, Red Party, Green Party, and Centre Party—or a right-wing bloc, potentially led by the ethnonationalist-neoliberal Progress Party, currently polling second behind Labour, and joined by the Conservative Party, Christian Democratic Party, and Liberal Party.

With less than two weeks to go, some polling indicates the red-green bloc may secure a majority in the Storting. But it remains a tight race. August polling averages, for instance, show the red-green coalition with 85 mandates, a narrow majority, against the right-wing bloc’s 84 mandates.

From the MAGA perspective, Trump has spent the first 100 days of his second term well. Clearly intent on making better use of his time than the last time around, Trump has embarked on what I have called a blitzkrieg presidency: a frenetic politics of shock-and-awe intent on “flooding the zone.” Policies range from from the bizarre, such as ordering the federal government to stop buying paper straws, to the world-impacting, like the infamous April 2nd tariffs. As the Washington Post writes, “No president in modern times has moved more swiftly than Trump to remake so many parts of government, as well as some outside institutions.” In so doing, the 47th president seems to have hoped to disorient and overwhelm any opposition to his administration’s far-reaching program of institutional, economic, and cultural transformation.

The United States, though fiercely militaristic across much of the globe, has been a friend and protector to the Nordic countries. Unlike Iraqis, Afghans, Vietnamese, and other peoples around the world who have become acquainted with the uglier realities of American empire, the Nordics have done well by the transatlantic relationship.

Freed from hot conflicts and dangerous geopolitical entanglements, the Nordics have been left alone to develop their natural resources and industrial base, from Denmark’s Novo Nordisk to Norway’s highly profitable oil sector, netting it the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, and Sweden’s globally-oriented companies like IKEA and Spotify.

Benjamin R. Teitelbaum (2020). War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right. Penguin Books.

Daniel A. Bell (2023). The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University. Princeton University Press.

Published half a decade ago now, War for Eternity examines the rise of the new right, including the alt-right or “populist nationalist” movement, via key figures like Steve Bannon, Aleksandr Dugin, and a smattering of other far-right characters from across the globe. Sadly, the book remains even more relevant now, five years later, under Trump 2.0.

The philosopher Hegel once described observing Napoleon riding out from the town of Jena after battling the Prussian army. On horseback, Napoleon, “this world-soul,” in Hegel’s words, was a “wonderful sensation to see.” The conquering French statesman seemed to embody history itself, an overwhelming force “concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse,” who, Hegel wrote, “reaches out over the world and masters it.”

When Trump strode out onto the stage in the Rose Garden—soon reportedly to be paved over, like in a Joni Mitchell song— to announce his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2nd, he, too, seemed to embody the zeitgeist of an age: resentful, nationalistic, ludicrous, willing to apply punitive measures against everything from penguin-inhabited islands to the world’s second-biggest economy. This was indeed a (perverse) “world-soul” appearing before a stunned global audience. Concentrated in a single point, the empirical person of Donald J. Trump wielded a terrifying, Napoleonic power, channeled through what may have been an LLM-generated, but at any rate deeply irrational, formula, aimed at taking a wrecking ball to the world economy.

Arlie Russell Hochschild (2024). Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. The New Press.

Why do people continue to vote for Trump?

Arlie Hochschild is an eminent Berkeley sociologist with half a century’s worth of experience, having invented key concepts like “emotional labor” in a 1983 study of service work, The Managed Heart, and the notion of a “second shift”—the domestic labor that is (still) disproportionately performed by women. More recently, Hochschild has published a 2016 study of the Tea Party movement, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, based on observations and interviews in Louisiana.